It isn’t hard to find out what keyboard shortcuts are available on Slack, sometimes it takes someone else talking about them before you decide to play with them yourself.

This is my gentle nudge to you to try some of these shortcuts if you want to spend more time on the keyboard whilst using Slack.

These are for Slack on OS X, but I am sure similar functionality exists on Windows and Web versions.

Some Definitions

Before I get started, there is some terminology which may be confusing to people who haven’t used Slack that much;

Slack Team – Think of this like an organisation, you are invited into organisations and have a unique profile in them all.

Channel – Think of this like a room or an area, normally Channels have a specific purpose, so maybe around a particular project or feature.

DM – A direct message. This is a message shared between you and one other person, no one else will be able to read it.

Jump between Slack Teams

If you have more than one Slack Team set up in your app you can quickly jump between them by pressing ⌘ + the number of the Team.

The number of the team is written under the logo for the team at the very left hand side of the application. They count up from 1. If you have more than 9 Teams (guilty!) only the first 9 are available.

You can rearrange the order of your teams by clicking and dragging, put your most used ones near the top for easy access.

Jump to a conversation

Pressing ⌘ + t brings up the jump to conversation dialog. I use this all the time. If you start typing the name of someone it will autocomplete to easily allow you to jump into the conversation. Typing a public/private channel will autocomplete to it too.

If someone has mentioned you in a channel or sent you a DM, you can quickly go to it by pressing ⌘ + t and hitting enter (or pressing the up/down arrows and selecting the area you were mentioned in).

Emoji replies and reactions

Pressing : then typing the name of the emoji you want will start an autocomplete, you can select the one you want and press enter to select it.

To react to the previous post you can press ⌘ + shift + \ and again you can autocomplete by typing the name.

Finding more Shortcuts

These are just the shortcuts I’ve used the most, there may be things you do which I haven’t covered. You can find all the supported shortcuts by pressing ⌘ + ?

This is part of our Slack mini series, where we quickly explain simple and more advanced Slack features. Excellent for beginners or if you just need a quick refresher.

If there is a feature you would like us to cover please drop us an email or tweet.